Maine is one of the few states whose highest court has flatly refused to create a bad-faith tort. There are no punitive damages waiting at the end of a wrongly denied claim. What Maine gives you instead is money-for-time: an overdue claim carries interest at 1.5% a month, and the insurer has to pay your lawyer. That is a real lever, and it is cheap to pull — but it only bites if the insurer has left your claim sitting rather than formally disputing it.
Three listing slots on this page are available to attorneys licensed in Maine who handle disputes against insurers. Listings are paid advertising sold at a flat monthly rate. They are shown in the order they were purchased. We do not rank, score, endorse or recommend any attorney, and we have not assessed the quality of anyone’s work.
This is the service the Maine Judicial Branch’s own Find Legal Help page points to. It charges a $35 administrative fee, and the lawyer it refers you to will not charge for the first half-hour. We could not verify a current telephone number from an official page — use the web form rather than a number found elsewhere. Maine runs no certified-specialist programme of its own. The Board of Overseers of the Bar regulates and disciplines lawyers and publishes an attorney directory, but it certifies nobody in insurance, coverage or any other field, so there is no official badge to look for. Judge candidates on what they have actually litigated.
Worth checking before you spend money on a lawyer. Two different measures exist, and they are not interchangeable — one is a real payment record, the other is a complaint count.
Health insurers selling on the federal marketplace must report how many claims they received and how many they refused. The figures are public and free to inspect.
The spread is the point. Two insurers selling comparable cover in the same state can refuse wildly different shares of what they are billed for. Look your own up before you assume your refusal was routine.
Source: CMS Transparency in Coverage public use files, plan year 2023 experience. Self-reported by insurers and not audited. Covers federal-marketplace plans only — not employer cover, and not state-run marketplaces. Post-service claims only.
There is no free public figure showing what share of home or auto claims any named insurer pays. Insurers do report it to regulators, but in most states that filing is confidential. Any table you see online quoting payout percentages for property insurers is either a paid commercial product or an estimate.
What is public is the complaint index — how many confirmed complaints a company generates against its share of the market. 1.00 is average. 3.00 means three times the complaints its size would predict.
Complaint indexes are published by state insurance departments and compiled by the NAIC. Figures move with both the company’s complaints and the wider market’s.
Under § 2436(1) a claim is payable within 30 days after the insurer receives proof of loss and ascertains that the claim is valid — 60 days under the standard fire policy, 2 months for individual life insurance. If the insurer asks in writing for more information inside that window, the clock restarts when the information arrives. A claim “neither disputed nor paid within 30 days is overdue”, and interest starts. To dispute it the insurer must send a written statement of the grounds, “based upon a reasonable investigation of the claim” and detailed enough for you to understand and respond. Separately, § 2164-D requires claim forms and an explanation of how to use them within 15 calendar days of a request, acknowledgment of written communications with reasonable promptness, and a coverage decision within a reasonable time after the investigation is finished. Long-term care claims are outside § 2436 entirely.
The 18% interest can be switched off with a letter. Section 2436 only charges interest on an undisputed claim, so an insurer that formally disputes your claim in writing — with grounds, based on a reasonable investigation — owes nothing extra no matter how long the fight then takes or how wrong it turns out to be. Maine’s prompt-payment statute punishes silence and drift, not denial. The insurer that says no quickly and in writing is in a far better position than the one that leaves your file on a desk.
A complaint to the Maine Bureau of Insurance costs nothing, creates a written record, and sometimes moves a stalled claim on its own. It is not a substitute for legal advice and it does not pause any deadline — but there is rarely a reason not to do it first.
This page is information, not legal advice. Insurance law differs by state and changes often. Nothing here creates a lawyer–client relationship, and no page can tell you whether your own claim is worth pursuing. If a deadline may be close, speak to a lawyer licensed in your state now rather than later — several of the deadlines described here start running on the date of the loss, not the date your claim was refused.
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